Earth Mother Rages Down at Us and Yet We Have No Clue - Kirsten Liang

She rages because long long ago,

Our ancestors forgot how to pronounce

Her name. So she chokes our offices

With shells of ivy, corners us in our

Bedrooms with invasions of disease.

But we spray off the ivy’s hooks

With chemicals and toxins,

don new masks that block disease.

And instead of shaking our fists

At the sky, we thank God.

And angrier still, she pierces our chests

With daggers of light as we sleep.

Yet we rise from our living room futons,

oblivious and smiling, warm

from the blood of invisible wounds.

And she is why the gentle animals

go rabid and mad.

I tell myself that when humans

rage, with warheads

And rifles, they are but secretly rabid,

the politicians’ wrists

tattooed with infected bite marks

Beneath the cuffs of their suits and it

Was this thought that allowed me to digest, like

an insect in the clamped jaws of

A flytrap plant, how my kindest friend once

split open

His knuckles from ramming his fist into a wall,

Pretending the wall was not a wall

but everyone

He’s ever known, and this behavior was not his but

That of the primeval goddess,

the one whom we’d forgotten

The name of long long ago,

she who slices our ankles with thistles

as we gallop with our loved ones in the fields,

the few fields left with wildflowers

wildflowers that we haven’t uprooted.

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Kirsten Liang is fifteen years old but wishes she were seventeen so she could watch R-rated films. Her work has placed in many competitions for students: on an international level in the 2022 Writing Contest hosted by Wintermute Lit, on a national level at the Scholastic Writing Awards, and on a state level at the 2022 National History Day Competition. She is trying to be more optimistic.